LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Shelf a.V.5.. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. | 



/ 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION 
AND CHRIST 



MARVIN R. VINCENT, D.D. 






NEW YORK 
ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY 

(incorporated) 
l82 FIFTH AVENUE 



\ 



K. 



N/5" 



Copyright, 1894, by 

ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY 

(incorporated) 



PRESS OF 

EDWARD O. JENKINS' SON, 

NEW YORK. 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 



The church is not agreed as to the nature, extent 
and operations of Biblical inspiration. The discussions 
of the subject have produced a large crop of adjectives 
which are intended to serve as definitions. Out of the 
darkness occasionally comes a dogmatic thunder-clap 
announcing that this or that is indispensable to an or- 
thodox conception of inspiration, but it is only thunder, 
and we are no better and no worse off than before. 

HOW FAR IS DEFINITION POSSIBLE ? 

As to what inspiration is essentially, it is not likely 
that we can ever reach a definition, any more than we 
can reach a definition of life. The word " inspiration " 
tells us very little. It is merely inbreathing. It gives 
us no hint of the source or of the moral quality of that 
which is inbreathed. It may mean simply the impart- 
ing of the physical power of respiration. The mean- 
ings which are popularly assigned to it do not reside 
in the word, but attach to it through theological usage. 
The Greek word §eo7iveuaria carries us a little farther. 
It tells us that the inbreathed force, whatever it be, is 
imparted by God, and thus indicates its essential moral 
quality. This is all. Neither word answers the ques- 
tion, what is the peculiar quality which we call inspira- 
tion, which differentiates the Bible from all other books 

(3) 



4 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

and makes it authoritative as a rule of faith and prac- 
tice? 

For it is evident that if we confine ourselves to the 
words "inspiration," " fteoxveuozia" we still have no 
standard by which to distinguish the Bible from scores 
of other books. According to its primary meaning, in- 
spiration is not confined to the Bible. It exists and 
works wherever God breathes life and power into men. 
A work of genius is inspired. A good life is inspired. 
A deed of heroism is an inspiration. St. John's gos- 
pel is inspired, but so are the Iliad, and Hamlet and 
the Divina Commedia. And yet it is entirely consist- 
ent with this to say that the peculiar quality of Biblical 
inspiration is higher than the inspiration of these works, 
and imparts to the Bible a character which belongs to 
none of them. What this peculiar element is, is the 
thing we want to know. 

THE NATURE OF BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AN INDUCTION 
FROM THE ACTUAL PHENOMENA OF THE BIBLE. 

In the discussion of this question we are thrown 
wholly and only upon the phenomena exhibited by the 
Bible itself. The Bible does not formally describe or 
define its own inspiration. It says nothing about its 
own quality as a book, for the simple reason that no 
Biblical writer is cognizant of the book as a whole. All 
that is possible for us is to collate the phenomena of 
the book, and to deduce from these our conception or 
definition of inspiration. Our final formula, moreover, 
whatever it be, must include all the phenomena. Es- 
pecially, we cannot be allowed to start with any a 
priori hypothesis and attempt to fit the phenomena into 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 5 

this. In other words, we must not begin by saying, 
"inspiration, in the nature of the case, must be this or 
that. It must exclude this or include that." Such a 
process is not scientific but empirical, and can never 
lead to any substantial or reliable result. This is clearly 
shown by the history of physical science. So long as 
astronomers proceeded on the assumption that the earth 
was the stationary centre of the universe, or that the 
orbits of the planets must, in the nature of the case, be 
perfect circles, the way was barred to all correct scien- 
tific results. These assumptions had to be thrown out 
of the process of investigation before any real progress 
could be made. They ran against the facts at every 
point, and the attempt to adjust the facts to the assump- 
tions resulted in absurdities and poetic fancies. It may 
indeed happen, now and then, that legitimate deductions 
from actual phenomena indicate the correctness of an a 
priori hypothesis : but such cases are not common, and 
when they occur, they only show that the hypothesis 
was a happy guess, and do not justify the process. To 
say that, in the nature of the case, Biblical inspiration 
must be this or that, is to beg the question at issue. The 
nature of the case is the very thing we want to know, 
and this is not fixed by the dogmatic assertions of indi- 
viduals or of church councils. It can be determined, if 
determined at all, only by the facts. We must go as 
far as these carry us, and stop if they do not carry us 
as far as we may desire. Beyond that point w~e may 
speculate, but we must not dogmatize. 

Let us consider some of the facts. We have in the 
Bible a book containing a certain revelation, largely 
historical, of the person and character of God, and of 



6 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

his purposes toward men — a revelation which is ex- 
pressly designed to bring human nature into conformity 
with the divine character, to inform it with aspiration 
for this, and to furnish impulses and rules for its attain- 
ment. 

A DISTINCTION BETWEEN REVELATION AND SCRIPTURE. 

The Bible is a record, a medium, a vehicle of divine 
revelation ; but it is important that a distinction should 
be made between revelation and Scripture, though the 
two are intimately and necessarily associated. We 
must be especially careful not to identify .them ; for 
from such identification it follows that a book is a ne- 
cessity of a revelation, that the book must be co-exten- 
sive with the revelation, and that the revelation must 
be limited by the book. It follows that no character 
can attach to revelation which does not attach to the 
book: that the book is as complete, as purely divine, 
as unmixed with human error, passion, and infirmity as 
the revelation. It follows that the design of God in 
his revelation included the production of an immacu- 
late book. Revelation, which is essentially divine, 
pure and inerrant, is inspired in the highest sense that 
can attach to that term. It is the very breath of 
God : the expression of the life of God. The identifi- 
cation of revelation and Scripture therefore implies 
that Scripture is inspired in the same sense, and that 
an inspired book means a faultless book. 

A BOOK NOT A NECESSITY OF A REVELATION. REVELA- 
TION LARGER THAN ITS RECORD. 

Now the phenomena of Scripture directly contradict 
these positions. In the first place they prove that a 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 7 

book is not a necessity of a revelation. On the testimony 
of the Bible itself, revelation is larger than its record. 
The Bible tells us of a revelation of God to men before 
there was any Bible, a revelation not conveyed by 
writing : a revelation given in divers manners — by di- 
rect communication of God with individuals, by 
visions, by symbols, by theophanies, by signs and won- 
ders. We are told of Noah as the man who built the 
ark and survived the deluge ; but there is a whole un- 
written history in the brief statement that Noah was 
perfect in his generations. We can only guess what is 
locked up in the words, " Enoch walked with God." 
There was a revelation of God through human deeds 
and human characters which is only hinted at in the 
Bible, and which, we may be sure, included much that 
is not even hinted at. Moreover, there has been a 
revelation of God, a revelation embracing new factors, 
since the canon of Scripture was closed, and which will 
continue to unfold until time shall end. Are we indeed 
to believe that the revelation of God in history is lim- 
ited to the history of the Jewish nation and to the few 
side-glances at Gentile history ? Is there no revelation 
in the history of nineteen centuries? Has there been 
no voice of God, no divine lesson in the rise and fall of 
empires, the vast social and moral revolutions, the 
career and wreck of dynasties since the last line of the 
New Testament was penned ? Is the revelation of 
God through the church confined to the Jewish Church, 
and the Christian Church as portrayed in the book of 
Acts and the Epistles of Paul? As well say that a 
great man's biography is completed with the story of 
his infancy. A revelation grander in its proportions, 



8 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

wider in its sweep, richer in its fruits, has unfolded in 
the historic development of the Christian Church with 
its magnificent missionary and philanthropic enterprise, 
and its unequalled record of Christian heroism. 

As to the revelation of God in science, the elaborate 
attempts to show that Scripture anticipates modern 
science are scarcely worth noticing. Scripture was not 
intended to teach science. It is indeed possible, as 
numerous examples have shown, that a quick observa- 
tion of the phenomena of nature by untutored men in 
an unscientific age should detect and state results which 
modern science has traced to their causes and placed in 
their appropriate categories. Some such things we find 
in the Bible ; but to assume from this that it was God's 
intention to incorporate into Scripture the germs of 
modern science is absurd. Where the Bible deals with 
physical science at all, it does so under contemporary 
limitations of scientific knowledge. The Psalmist is 
impressed with the glory of the starry heavens ; so was 
Homer, only Homer did not know the Psalmist's God, 
and did not bring him into his beautiful picture in the 
Iliad. To the Psalmist the heavens declared the glory 
of God, and the firmament showed his handy-work ; 
but the whole conception, though essentially and pro- 
foundly truthful, was poetic and not scientific in form. 
Where in the Bible can there be found any exhibition 
of the physical universe approaching in grandeur the 
revelations of the divine wisdom and glory furnished by 
modern astronomy \ 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 9 

THE MORAL REVELATION IN SCRIPTURE PROGRESSIVE. 

The moral revelation contained in the Bible itself is 
progressive. In every age which it depicts there is a 
large element of reserve in the divine revelation. 
What was imparted to Christ's disciples in the upper 
chamber, was not and could not be given to the Israel- 
ites at the foot of Sinai. John could not have writ- 
ten his first Epistle on the morning when he recognized 
Jesus on the lake-shore What was tolerated and even 
approved by God in the days of the patriarchs was 
condemned by Christ. Abraham was the friend of 
God : God styled himself the God of Jacob ; David 
was declared to be a man after God's own heart ; yet 
the moral and spiritual level of Abraham and Jacob 
and David is lower than that of Paul and John. God 
advanced from a revelation through symbols to a reve- 
lation through the prophets ; from a revelation through 
the prophets to a revelation through his Son. Each 
lower stage contained a premonition of the higher. Is 
it not intended, is it not one of the valuable funda- 
mental truths of the Bible which we are asked to learn 
from the Bible and to use in shaping our conception of 
Kevelation — that revelation is essentially progressive % 
Does not the Bible, while it holds up to us its own rev- 
elation, persistently point beyond itself and lead us to 
expect ever new and larger unfoldings of the life and 
truth which it presents ? 

THE BOOK NOT AS PURELY DIVINE AS THE REVELATION. 

Or do the phenomena of Scripture testify that the 
book is as purely divine, as unmixed with human traits 



10 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

as the revelation of God? Assuredly not. Nothing 
can be plainer than that the morally perfect revelation 
commits itself to a morally imperfect human medium. 
The pure sunlight passes into the minster through win- 
dows which are stained, cracked, and obscured with dust 
and cobwebs. Light is imparted — the light of the sun. 
Men within the minster see, and the sunlight is no less 
sunlight because the wiudows transmit it imperfectly. 
If it were indispensable to vision that the eye should 
be as perfect as the light which it reflects, the world 
would be full of the blind, since scientists tell us that a 
perfect eye is rarely if ever found. 

The facts of Scripture do not show that a book is a 
necessity of a revelation : they do not show that, if a 
book is used, the book must be as faultless as the reve- 
lation, or, like the revelation, simply and purely divine. 
They do not show that, in giving a revelation through 
Scripture, God contemplated the production of an im- 
maculate book. If such was his purpose, we should be 
fully warranted in expecting to find indications of it in 
the book itself, and in the history of its transmission. 
Such a purpose would involve the most minute and 
careful supervision of the entire process of transmission, 
by word of mouth, by transcription, by printing, by 
translation. It is evident to the most superficial obser- 
vation that no such supervision has been exercised : that 
the attitude of providence toward the preservation of 
textual accuracy, and verbal niceties, and correctness of 
translation has been that of comparative indifference. 
Errors of transcription and breaks in transmission have 
been suffered freely to intrude themselves. From the 
time of the composition of the New Testament books 



■i 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 11 

down to the fourth century, we are left without a 
manuscript copy. For our evidence of the existence and 
circulation and authoritativeness of those books during 
that period we are thrown upon versions from unknown 
originals, upon scattered notices and quotations in the 
works of church fathers and Christian apologists, or 
upon compilations or adaptations made by anti-Chris- 
tian or partially Christian writers in the interest of phi- 
losophic theories. At a very early date we find differ- 
ent texts in different sections of the church, and much 
uncertainty as to what was to be received as authentic 
and authoritative New Testament Scripture. In scores 
of cases we are not, after the most laborious critical re- 
search, absolutely certain as to the exact words of the 
original text. 

Or, to go farther back, the Old Testament Scripture 
largely in use by Jews and Christians in the days of 
Christ and of the Apostles, was the Septuagint or Greek 
translation, which was by no means a faithful transla- 
tion of the original Hebrew, often little better than a 
paraphrase, sometimes almost unintelligible, and, in not 
a few cases, intentionally garbled. 

Thousands of Christians had no access to the Bible 
except through the old Latin versions which were so 
corrupt as to make necessary the revision of Jerome, 
which is itself far from accurate. Thousands of English 
readers have received their only knowledge of Scripture 
from the versions of Tyndale, Wyclif, and the transla- 
tors of 1611, not one of which was free from grave 
errors. This is, of course, not to say that the Bible in 
these forms has failed to convey the substantial truth 
of God, or has not been a priceless treasure to his chil- 



12 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

dren in all those centuries. It is only to say that such 
facts, and they might easily be multiplied, furnish no 
evidence of any minute, special superintendence with 
a view to preserving intact an originally immaculate 
book. 

HUMAN ELEMENTS IN THE BIBLE. 

Of the human elements which interpenetrate the 
Bible it would almost seem superfluous to speak. They 
emerge at every point. The revelation does not clothe 
itself in a unique language of its own. It takes and 
uses human language as it finds it. It draws for its 
imagery and illustration upon the familiar facts of nature 
and of human life. It casts the truth into the mould 
of the age to which it is originally addressed, suffers it 
to be colored and flavored by the local and temporary 
traits of that age, and to be expounded according to its 
literary methods. The human agents selected to trans- 
mit the revelation are not ideally holy and perfect men. 
They are stained with human infirmities and sometimes 
with human crimes. Certain of the Old Testament 
saints would be justly ostracized by Christian society. 
Certain of the Old Testament utterances blaze with a 
passion which is anything but a divine rapture, and hiss 
with imprecations which shock even an average moralist. 

THE PRINCIPLE OF ACCOMMODATION TN SCRIPTURE. 

Moreover, the revelation of God in Scripture does 
not hold an independent and transcendent course of its 
own. It does not move on wings above the heads of 
men, sweeping in a straight line to its end, but walks 
on foot bv their side, climbing the heights, descending 
into the valleys, and following the winding paths along 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 13 

with. them. It does not arbitrarily transcend natural 
laws and rates of development : rather it accommodates 
itself to these and suffers its movement to be retarded 
by them. It is supernatural, yet it follows a natural 
process. It is divine, yet it measures its pace by the 
rate of natural historic development. It is eternal, yet 
there is a fulness of time before which its great crises 
are not suffered to arrive. Its design is to make men 
holy and loving and noble, yet it does not achieve this 
result by a sudden and miraculous moral transforma- 
tion. The rabble of Israelitish slaves is not lifted at a 
stroke out of the idolatries of Egypt and placed at the 
level of a Christian of the nineteenth century. The 
revelation of God in Christ is not given to Israel at 
Sinai. Naturally, it would have availed nothing. No 
miracle is wrought to make it immediately available. 
Centuries elapse before the Word is made flesh. The 
divine moral ideals finally enunciated by Christ, move 
slowly up towards realization through stages in which 
slavery and polygamy and retaliation and divorce are 
tolerated and encouraged ; in which the ferocity of bar- 
barous warfare is suffered to take its course ; in which 
Israel is commanded to massacre the Canaanites, and 
Jael is praised as an agent of God, in a triumphal 
hymn, for a deed of hideous and treacherous cruelty. 

EEEOES IN SCRIPTURE. 

Again, the Scriptures bear the marks of human ig- 
norance or inadvertence in certain of their statements. 
The Bible is not literally and verbally inerrant. It 
contains errors of detail, discrepancies of number and 
date and fact. Grant that these errors are trifling and 



14 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

do not affect the substantial value and truthfulness of 
the record as a whole : on the assumption that a divine 
revelation implies an immaculate record as its necessary 
complement, they present a very serious difficulty. 
They cannot be gotten over or explained away by any 
means at our command : and if the truthfulness and 
value of the revelation is dependent upon such a fact 
as this, the revelation must abandon its high claim. To 
meet such an issue by the assertion that, whatever the 
present condition of the record, the original autographs 
were absolutely without flaw, is a desperate resource 
which requires no discussion. To base a positive dogma 
upon a statement which there are no means of verify- 
ing, upon the character of documents which have no 
existence, is to fly in the face not only of sound logic, 
but of common sense. It is high time that such argu- 
ments (by courtesy so called) should be abandoned by 
men who profess to be scholars and thinkers. God can 
make something out of nothing ; but the combined the- 
ologians, theological schools, and ecclesiastical councils 
of all time cannot make a valid argument for the verbal 
inerrancy of Scripture out of documents which it is im- 
possible for any one to consult. For all such it remains 
true that "ex nihilo nihil fit" 

It is thus apparent that a divine revelation must not 
be identified with its record, however intimately and 
necessarily associated with it : that a revelation which 
is wholly and essentially divine may ally itself for pur- 
poses of transmission or for other purposes with a me- 
dium which is not wholly divine. If the medium 
must be as divine and faultless as the revelation, 
which is the expression of God's own thought and will, 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 15 

then the conception of Biblical inspiration must in- 
clude imrnaculateness, inerrancy, and accordingly the 
Bible, tested by its own phenomena, is not inspired, and 
is not a proper vehicle of a divine revelation. If di- 
vine revelation includes the intent to make an inerrant 
book, the intent of divine revelation has not been car- 
ried out. If all of divine revelation is included in the 
Bible, the larger portion of human history contains no 
revelation of God. On the contrary, there is a large 
margin on either side of the book which teems with 
revelation. That the book has definite and important 
relations to this margin, that it may furnish the key to 
the interpretation of the history which precedes and 
follows the Bible, that it may teach us to discern God 
in history everywhere, — may be freely granted : but the 
facts already cited create enormous difficulties for one 
who begins by assuming that the Bible is the only rev- 
elation of God, and that the nature of its inspiration 
includes and demands an immaculate record. 

If then inspiration does not consist in or require in- . 
errancy, perfect consistency of detail, systematic state- 
ment and development of doctrine, transmission through 
men of perfect character, utterances wholly divine in 
spirit and word — where shall we seek for the spiritual 
force which makes the Bible the book of books, the 
authoritative rule of faith and practice? Where is 
lodged the transcendent quality of the Bible which 
warrants us in calling it inspired % 

PERSONALITY THE CENTRAL FACTOR OF INSPIRATION. 

We are at least safe in saying that inspiration is the 
Spirit of God informing the life, the work, and the 



16 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

word of men. It is not confined to documents. A holy 
deed is as truly inspired as a holy gospel or epistle. 
One element is indispensable. Inspiration must in- 
volve personality both in the inspirer and the inspired. 
Nothing impersonal can inspire or be inspired. A 
document is not inspired in its letters and words, but in 
the imparted personality of him who writes it. This 
element must be central to any truthful conception of 
inspiration, and to this we shall devote the remainder 
of the discussion. 

THE PERSONAL GOD IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

It goes without saying that the element of divine 
personality — the direct, sharply-defined, emphasized 
energy of the personal God — pervades Scripture. 
Scripture treats history, not as a natural evolution of 
physical and psychological laws, but as the develop- 
ment of a divine purpose. It is the story of the con- 
tact of the personal God with humanity. Its dominant 
idea is God's effort to make man godlike. In secular 
history religion is incidental. In Biblical history it is 
central. Scripture history illustrates God's dealing 
with man in selection, in guidance, in pardon and pun- 
ishment, in spiritual education, in national triumph, 
disaster, and humiliation, in redemption and restora- 
tion. The Bible is full of God's yearning and striving 
to breathe his own Spirit into the thought, the feeling, 
the activity, the literary product, the social and domes- 
tic life, the national ideals, and the jurisprudence of the 
race. It is not the working of an abstract " power not 
ourselves which makes for righteousness " that this his- 
tory portrays. A moral power without personality is, 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 17 

in any case, a philosophical absurdity ; and the vast 
movement of Hebrew history is neither propelled nor 
controlled by an abstraction. The Hebrew Scriptures 
— not only in their substance, but in their language 
with its bold anthropomorphisms, in their dramatic 
vividness, in their startling and sublime theophanies, — 
are alive with the presence and activity of the personal 
Jehovah. TV here modern thought would put second 
causes, the Old Testament puts the First Cause. Where 
modern representations, even with a distinct conscious- 
ness of a higher, supernatural agency, would put the 
natural agent, or the farmer, the general, the states- 
man into the foreground, — in the Bible representation 
God clothes his hands with lightning and flings the 
flash across the sky ; God empties his urns on the hill- 
tops, and sends the streams down into the valleys ; God 
covers the pastures with flocks and makes the corn- 
lands stand thick w T ith waving ears. God in person 
conducts the campaigns of Barak and of Gideon, and 
draws the fatal cordon round Jericho. Abraham's mi- 
gration is not the mere natural impulse of a restless 
nomad : God calls him into the strange country. God 
arranges the nuptials of Isaac, peoples Jacob's sleep at 
Bethel with visions, and grapples with him at Jabbok. 

So it is throughout. No sense of the transcendent 
majesty of God runs into a sense of his remoteness. 
Every Hebrew is trained to believe in his personal 
presence in camp and in city, and to expect his direct 
interference in the most ordinary details. God burns 
in glory upon the ark, and overshadows the tabernacle 
with his cloud ; yet he directs the manufacture of 
curtains and fringes, of rings, knops, and flowers. He 



18 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

drives back the Eed Sea, yet he prescribes all the 
minute sanitary details of the Levitical code. Nay, 
the sense of his divine majesty is appealed to in order 
to heighten the sense of his minute and special care; 
as in the Pilgrim Psalm, where the Maker of heaven 
and earth conies down from the mountains into the 
camp, the keeper of all Israel, yet mounting guard 
over a single sleeper's tent. 

HUMAN PERSONALITY IX SCRIPTURE. 

A corresponding emphasis upon human personality 
appears throughout Scripture. The main thrust of the 
divine energy is upon man, upon human character. 
Men constitute the fibre of the Bible, men in their dif- 
ferent relations to the divine purpose and working. 
Mere precept is comparatively impotent apart from 
personality. Detach their exhortations, command- 
ments, denunciations from the personalities of Moses, 
David, Samuel, and Elijah ; take them out of their 
historical setting and throw them into categories — and 
the main force of their appeal is gone. Accordingly, 
through the entire Bible there runs a line of represent- 
ative men, chosen organs of the inspiration of the 
Almighty, kindled and guided by his Spirit. "The 
life is the light of men." The chief appeal of the 
Bible is through men. The power and the inspiration 
of the Bible are not in naked precept, though the pre- 
cept be divine, but in the incarnation of precept in 
heroic and holy lives : not in the poetic beauties of 
Hebrew song as divinely dictated words, but in its un- 
folding of the longing, the ecstasy, the penitence, the 
humiliation, the love, and the hope of human souls, 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 



19 



bared to the touch of God, and responding to the reve- 
lations of his character and will ; not in the minute 
correspondence of events with prophetic details, but in 
the penetrating moral insight of divinely-moved men 
into the moral tendencies of their age, and their persist- 
ent pointing to the divine principles of conduct and 
life. 



THE MOVEMENT OF THE DIVINE ENERGY IN SCRIPTURE 
AFFECTED AND MODIFIED BY ITS HUMAN MEDIA. 

An important fact at this point, already fore- 
shadowed, is that the movement of this divine, per- 
sonal energy in Scripture, is affected and modified 
by the human media through which it operates. The 
divine force recognizes, accepts, and to a very consider- 
able extent, accommodates itself to these limitations. 
Inspiration is content to work through such men as it 
finds, while it none the less works to educate and to 
sanctify the men. It does not wait for perfect men. 
It glows in Abraham and Jacob and Moses with a 
power distinctly recognized by the New Testament 
writer who catalogues them as examples for the Christ- 
ian Church. None the less it is apparent, and Scrip- 
ture is at no pains to conceal or to palliate the fact, 
that the inspiration goes hand in hand with moral in- 
firmity. We have the twenty-third Psalm, and we 
have David the seducer and murderer. We have 
Elijah, magnificent on Carrnel, and pitiable under the 
juniper tree. We have Jacob, a vulgar trickster at 
Beersheba and Pa dan Aram, and a prince of God at 
Jabbok. We have Abraham's faith on Moriah and 
Abraham's lie in Egypt. We have God's own testi- 



20 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

mony to the uprightness of Job, and Job's frenzied 
challenge of Almighty justice. Inspiration consents to 
ally itself with that which is morally inferior to its own 
divine quality, with a human element which it lifts and 
guides and uses, but which it refuses to suppress or to 
crush. 

Accordingly the quality of the men imparts itself to 
their utterances. If we view the writings apart from 
the men, and apart from their historical conditions, we 
find it difficult to reconcile them with any of the tradi- 
tional theories of Biblical inspiration. They reflect the 
spiritual and moral limitations and imperfections of their 
authors. The imprecatory Psalms with their dreadful 
words of vengeance and their withering curses are in the 
canon along with the Sermon on the Mount. Ko forc- 
ing process, however vigorous or ingenious, can wrench 
the Psalms into harmony with the Sermon. The 
only possible solution of the inconsistency lies in the 
clear recognition of the historic consciousness in Scrip- 
ture, in the recognition that revelation is progressive ; 
in the perception of the sharp distinction between the 
historic and the preceptive; between what is fixed and 
what is in movement toward fixedness ; between etern- 
al, immutable, divine canons, and the education of 
wayward human wills ; between wayside landmarks in 
the history of moral and spiritual progress, and ulti- 
mate standards of character ; above all, in the percep- 
tion of the large element of human personality in 
Scripture, working alongside of the divine, and at once 
employed, tolerated, and educated in its contact with 
the divine. 

If, in other words, we read the Bible as a history of 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 21 

the growth of divine principles and character in men, of 
the progressive operation of divine grace upon men, as a 
record of the successive stages by which humanity has 
been pushed God ward — if we consent to study inspira- 
tion in persons rather than in documents, or in documents 
chiefly as informed with personality, then it will not 
be hard to find in Scripture a legitimate place and 
function for utterances which exhibit the grade and 
quality of the moral sentiment generated and tolerated 
in the " times of ignorance" which "God overlooked." 
Then the Christian reader, putting himself for the 
time at the historic level of the men who could pray 
with such vengeful thoughts and scorching words, will 
discern in those words that which God has caused to be 
recorded for his instruction and warning — a tide-mark 
in the rise of spiritual culture, and a finger-post point- 
ing away from itself toward a purer moral ideal. 

I have already spoken of that other feature of the 
limitations incident to transmission of divine revelation 
through human media, namely, that inspiration works 
through the ordinary individual methods and agencies 
of men. This is not to say that it never transcends 
them, but that the Bible as a whole comes to us stamped 
with the intellectual and moral characteristics of the 
writers of its different books, and clothed in the forms 
peculiar to the different ages in which they were writ- 
ten. On this it is unnecessary to dwell. 

All such facts accentuate the personal element of in- 
spiration — the divine Spirit's residence and operation in 
men. They show that the Spirit refuses to relinquish 
this medium because of limitations, intellectual or 
moral. The transcendent quality of Scripture does not 



22 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

reside in verbal inerrancy, in consistency of detail, or in 
quality of phraseology and style as Coleridge remarks. 
There may be dictation without inspiration, and inspira- 
tion without dictation. Balaam's ass was the passive 
organ of divine dictation, but no one would think of 
calling the animal inspired. Inspiration does not turn 
on the agreement or disagreement between Samuel and 
Kings as to the number of horses which David took 
from Hadadezer, or as to whether David destroyed seven 
hundred or seven thousand chariots of the Syrians. It 
matters little whether Luke may or may not have made 
a slip as to Cyrenius, or that Matthew has put Jeremiah 
for Zechariah, or that Stephen's speech does not tally 
accurately with the narrative in Genesis. It matters 
nothing that Peter's Greek will not stand the tests of 
the Attic grammarians, or that Paul's Epistles are full 
of anacolutha and unclosed parentheses. Over and past 
all such trifles we are carried by the sense of God in 
the men ; as we see how they are dominated and swept 
onward by zeal for God, though their zeal sometimes 
finds expression in forms from which the Christian 
sense revolts : as we see how clearly they discern the 
facts and principles of the unseen world as the only 
eternal verities ; how they are possessed and burdened 
with its divine themes and goaded by its divine im- 
pulses until human words and symbols are strained to 
the breaking-point. 



This is the characteristic of prophecy : " Men spake 
from God, being borne along by the Holy Spirit." 
" Prophecy," as Professor Sanday remarks, " is the cen- 
tral phenomenon of Scripture." Prophecy is, primarily, 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 23 

instruction ; not merely and Dot principally prediction. 
It is forth-telling rather than fore-telling. " The most 
outstanding feature of prophecy," to quote the words 
of Professor Bruce, " to which all others must be sub- 
ordinated, and by which all others are best understood, 
is its ethical character. The prophets were not princi- 
pally foretellers or prognosticates of future events, 
and whatever predictions occur in their writings, and 
whatever use can be made of these for evidential pur- 
poses, the raison d'etre of this remarkable class of re- 
ligious teachers was not to supply materials for the apol- 
ogist. The prophets were, before all things, preachers 
of righteousness and mercy to Israel, specially to their 

contemporaries in Israel In all they say and 

do in fulfilment of their vocation, their obvious aim is 
to make a moral impression on the men among whom 

they live In uttering their predictions they 

have not in view men living in ages after, using these 
as arguments for the truth of revelation, but people 
nearer themselves, sinners and saints living in the same 
land, as their neighbors and fellow-countrymen. They 
are emphatically preachers to their own time, and they 
express themselves in the language best fitted to im- 
press their contemporaries, depicting the future in col- 
ors adapted to their circumstances, so that from their 
style you can form a guess as to their age Ever- 
more the future is described so as to suit the present 
need, and harmonize with the surroundings and the 
hopes and fears of the men to whom the prophetic mes- 
sage is primarily addressed, and on whom it is meant 
to act as a source of inspiration." (" The Chief End 
of Revelation," p. 197.) 

Whether in the form of psalmody, wisdom, ritual, or 



24 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

oracle, the instruction is prophecy. Moses is a prophet 
no less than Isaiah ; the unknown author of Ecclesiastes 
as well as Ezekiel. The prophets are organs of the di- 
vine Spirit. They are styled " Servants of God " and 
" men of the Spirit." Their close fellowship with God 
is asserted, and their word is his word : 

" Surely Adonai Jehovah doeth nothing 
Unless he hath revealed his secret plan 
To his servants the prophets." * 

They do not assume this office voluntarily, but under 
strong divine constraint, and sometimes reluctantly 
(Exod. iv. 1-12). They bring to bear upon the social 
and political conscience of their own age the great, 
divinely-revealed ideals of righteousness, truth, and 
mercy ; and by these ideals they measure and forecast 
national prosperity and national decadence. The j:>re- 
dictive element, which is the smallest element in their 
utterances, is, in great part, the result of a clear discern- 
ment of divine principles and of their inevitable bear- 
ings. In the light of these principles they detect the 
trend and the issue of contemporary tendencies ; but 
there are points where their vision of the future seems 
to transcend natural limits. Such knowledge and fore- 
cast and sharpened insight as might characterize a Mac- 
chiavelli or a Bismarck, operate side by side with higher 
and more mysterious phenomena of the divine afflatus. 

We who know the prophets only through their writ- 
ings, are in danger of overlooking the power of their 
personality, and of forgetting how largely the force of 
their appeal to their age lay in that. Rebuke and warn- 

*Amos iii. 7, 8. See Professor Briggs' "Messianic Prophecy," 
p. 16. 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 25 

ing, prediction and denunciation wrought their effects 
through the living voice, the familiar form, the play of 
the well-known features, the symbolic acts. They were 
felt as Moses dashed down the tables of the law ; as 
Elijah called down fire upon Carmel ; as Jeremiah 
broke the bottle in the valley of Hinnom. 

THE MESSIANIC ELEMENT IN PROPHECY. 

Again, the great gulf-stream of prophecy is the Mes- 
sianic current ; the growing ideal of the Messiah-King, 
his work and his kingdom. All the principles and 
features of the divine administration expounded by the 
prophets are in process of development towards his 
personal reign. All the mandates of the divine will, 
all the yearnings of the divine heart are expanding into 
the full flower of Messianic fulfilment. This is the 
ideal which informs the love and hope and faith and de- 
sire of the Old Testament saints, the ideal conceived 
under the forms and conditions of their own age, and 
which gives its specific and essential character to the re- 
demption which they expound, and the full glory of 
which they await. 

The phenomena of inspiration, as it thus reveals it- 
self through human media, all fall, therefore, into a 
common movement towards a consummate expression 
which shall exhibit inspiration as no less the divine im- 
press on human personality, but at its full power, un- 
fettered by the intellectual crudity and moral infirmity 
with which it has all along struggled. The Spirit of 
God tolerates and uses imperfect media, but always 
with a forward look towards a higher expression in the 
perfect manhood of Jesus Christ. The later phase of 
Biblical inspiration is thus true to the direction of 



26 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

its whole earlier drift. The inspired personality of 
Jesus, "full of the Holy Ghost," though in itself 
unique, is the consummate development of a movement 
which has been from the beginning associated with 
human personality. The whole stream of Old Testa- 
ment revelation has been sweeping onward from God 
in man to the God-man. The entire history of " men 
moved by the Holy Ghost," culminates in " the "Word 
made flesh." 

THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS IS THE SPIRIT OF PROPHECY. 

When we have reached this point, we hold the key 
to the inspiration of Scripture. As we have seen that 
prophecy is the central phenomenon of Scripture, we 
now see that Jesus is the central phenomenon of 
prophecy : that " the testimony of Jesus is the spirit 
of prophecy." As prophecy works all along through 
personality, so Jesus incarnates the spirit and the sub- 
stance of prophecy in a perfect personality. Into him- 
self he gathers up all that is vital and eternal in 
prophecy, whether in psalm, ritual, or wisdom. Moses, 
the prophet of the law, is first fully interpreted by 
Christ the fulfiller of the law. " Beginning from 
Moses and all the prophets," he interprets " in all the 
Scriptures the things concerning himself." " The 
Scriptures," he declares, " testify of me." He repre- 
sents at once the divine energy and the consummate re- 
sult of inspiration. He is a man speaking from God 
and moved by the Holy Spirit. All that is essentially 
divine in Old Testament personality appears in him in 
full manifestation, in new, wider, and more varied rela- 
tions, and in perfect symmetry. The divine impulses 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 27 

which come upon Old Testament prophets in occasional, 
transient gusts, breathe upon him with a steady and 
uniform intensity. 

JESUS AND THE NEW TESTAMENT. 

It becomes the more evident, as we study the New 
Testament, that the personality of Christ is so woven 
into its fibre that it cannot be detached without the ut- 
ter ruin of the New Testament regarded as a docu- 
ment. The words of Jesus are indeed "spirit and 
life," but they are so as he speaks them. They are in- 
spired as his words. The New Testament is unique 
in that its moral and spiritual value as a group of writ- 
ings is absolutely dependent upon this divine personal- 
ity. It might help us to a better understanding of 
Plato if we could know Plato as we know Christ. It 
does help us that we know something of Socrates. 
But that makes little difference after all. "Whatever 
Plato's thought can do for us, it does without Plato 
himself. It would do as much under any other name 
or under no name. But Christ's words are compara- 
tively impotent without him. Whatever may or may 
not be essential to the exhibition of abstract truth or 
of physical science, incarnation is a necessity of a 
divine revelation of moral and spiritual truth. The 
ideas of such a revelation refuse to be divorced from 
personality. Sin, pardon, faith, love, hope, holiness, 
will, conscience, — all are personal ; and the essence of 
Christianity is the entrance of a new spiritual con- 
sciousness, a new will, a new affection, a new person- 
ality in short, into human nature. 



28 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

JESUS INTEEPEETS THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Having reached this point, we find that the light is 
thrown back from it upon the previous revelation. 
Recurring to the imperfect media which divine inspira- 
tion selected as its own vehicles, and to the large 
amount of human crudity, ignorance, and moral infirmity 
which attach to these, we find at once an apology for 
the fact (if one be needed), a corrective, and an abso- 
lute standard by which to test the utterances of man or 
document. Christ himself states the apology for cer- 
tain features of the legal revelation on the ground of 
rudimentary moral conditions which God suffered to 
work themselves out, and did not choose to abolish by 
miracle. With equal distinctness, however, he asserts 
that such conditions were not according to the divine 
archetype. "Moses, for the hardness of your hearts, 
suffered you to put away your wives ; but from the be- 
ginning it hath not been so." * 

And Christ asserts himself as the corrector of such 
features of the legal dispensation. " Ye have heard 
that it was said by them of old time .... but I say 
unto you." That is final. The other is only tempo- 
rary and provisional. " An eye for an eye and a tooth 
for a tooth" has no place in the Sermon on the Mount. 
The spirit of Elijah is rebuked in John and James. 
The vengeful words of the imprecatory Psalms are out 
of tune with " Bless them that curse you," and " For- 
give us our debts as we forgive our debtors." 

*Matt. xix. 8. 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 29 

the clue to the continuity of the revelation 

and to the inspiration of scripture is in 

Christ's person. 

As we take our stand beside Christ and look back- 
ward, we now for the first time apprehend the 
continuity of the revelation and the inspiration of 
Scripture, and grasp the cine to it in his person. God 
in Christ is not a fact for the first time at Bethlehem. 
" God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto him- 
self." As Augustine puts it, " Christianity is as old as 
the world." The Word "was in the beginning"— the 
Word embodying the two prime factors of inspiration, 
life and light, and " the life was the light of men." 
Therefore Christ " corresponds to the whole tenor of 
the Scriptures of the past. The Hebrews who wist- 
fully look back to their temple, law, and ritual, are not 
taught a stern forgetfulness of what had been, nor led 
vaguely to spiritualize its meaning, but are led to re- 
alize, in each part of the ancient system, a line which 
leads up to Christ." * 

The Old Testament stream thus debouches into the 
New, leaving its banks strewn with broken types, 
obsolete ordinances, empty shells of symbol, moral 
accommodations, but carrying with it the great per- 
sonal factor of its inspiration, — God in man, living, 
speaking, writing. Prophecy is the dominant factor of 
the New Testament as of the Old. Still, only in a 
more pronounced and apprehensible sense, " the testi- 
mony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy." Prophecy is 
a charisma of the apostolic church, bnt its testimony 

* E. S. Talbot in " Lux Mundi." 



30 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

must be to Christ, or it is spurious. The Spirit con- 
tinues to move men, but the Spirit that refuses to con- 
fess that Christ is come in the flesh is not of God. 
New Testament prophecy is not only testimony to 
Christ, it is the testimony of Christ. The prophetic 
gift is identified with Christ as its dispenser and regu- 
lative standard. John declares that Jesus imparts the 
Spirit in his fulness.* Faith in Christ as the sphere 
and subjective condition of the power and function of 
believers, defines the proportion in which the prophetic 
endowment is shared (Rom. xii. 3, 6). Peter ascribes 
the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost directly to 
Christ (Acts ii. 32, 33) ; and Paul affirms that to 
apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers 
grace is dispensed according to the measure of the gift 
of Christ (Eph. iv. 7-11). That which makes proph- 
ecy the living reflection of the mind of God, is the tes- 
timony of Jesus. That through which the Spirit of 
God acts in prophecy to reprove, edify, comfort, and 
convict, is the testimony of Jesus. That which makes 
the fulfilment of prophecy other and more than a mere 
mechanical correspondence of event with pi-ediction, 
and which exhibits event and prediction as alike fac- 
tors of a moral and spiritual development in human 
history, is the testimony of Jesus. That which makes 
prophecy spirit instead of letter, which lifts its inspi- 
ration above the literal accuracy and peculiar structure 
of a document, which makes itself felt in what is an- 
onymous or pseudonymous no less than in what is au- 
thentic, which concentrates attention upon the light 

* John iii. 34. The correct reading omits 6 6e6g as the subject of 
diSuoiv, so that the subject is ' ' Christ " bv aireoTeitev 6 deoc. 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 31 

rather than upon the lantern, and which, ignoring ver- 
bal discrepancy and mistaken or imperfect science, 
blazes through all with divine radiance, searching the 
conscience and analyzing the thoughts and intents of 
the heart — is the testimony of Jesus. 

THE PERSONALITY OF JESUS AT ITS HIGHEST POWER 
UNDER THE DISPENSATION OF THE SPIRIT. 

This fact does not receive its final emphasis in the 
earthly personality of Jesus. That emphasis comes 
with his withdrawal from earthly conditions. Thus 
only can personality finally and fully enter into Biblic- 
al inspiration at its highest power. The gospel nar- . 
rative makes it evident that the immediate disciples 
of Jesus need a radical moral transformation and a 
larger spiritual outlook, before his personality can be- 
come in them an inspiration with a power of universal 
appeal. The Christian disciple who can say, " For 
me to Live is Christ," is still in the future. 

The ministry of the Holy Spirit was announced by 
Jesus as something far larger, richer, mightier and 
more fruitful than his ministry in the flesh, but none 
the less as peculiarly his own ministry. It inaugurated 
a new and distinct development in the character and 
work of the apostles, but the development was upon 
the same line, in that it was still a revelation and com- 
munication of his personal power. He plainly de- 
clared that the sum and substance of the Spirit's testi- 
mony should be himself; and that, in the coming and 
working of the Spirit he should come and work. The 
personality of Jesus, though withdrawn from sight 
and touch, now, for the first time, displays its un~ 



32 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

trammeled energy in the speech and writings of his 
disciples. He is not only the theme, but the inspiring 
force of their preaching. He preaches through them, 
writes in their letters, and lives and works in their con- 
secrated life and deeds. He pervades Peter's pente- 
costal sermon and Peter's transformed manhood. He 
is the momentum of Paul's splendid missionary career. 
He speaks in the rhythmical swell of the Ephesian 
letter, the involved parentheses of Komans, and the 
tumultuous diction of Second Corinthians. His resur- 
rection is not only a memory and a hope, but also a 
continuous power in the Apostle to the Gentiles. 
Paul's suffering is fellowship with Christ : his knowl- 
edge is summed up in Christ : his life is Christ. In 
brief, the whole magnificent impulse and victorious 
energy of the apostolic church is personal, — men 
speaking and working and enduring as moved by the 
Holy Ghost, and the testimony of Jesus the spirit of 
their prophecy. Their manual is the Old Testament, 
chiefly as it testifies of Christ. How little attention 
they bestowed upon the question of its structure and 
its verbal accuracy is apparent in their free use of the 
Septuagint with all its blunders of translation and in- 
tentional modifications of the Hebrew text, and in their 
citations in forms which verbally correspond to neither 
Hebrew nor Septuagint. Without any apparent con- 
sciousness of a scholastic theory of inspiration, they 
recognize the fact and the essential quality of inspira- 
tion. By no one is this more clearly expressed than by 
Peter, the last man in the world to concern himself 
with any scientific conception or definition of iheo- 
jmeustia. The Old Testament prophets, he says, caught 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 33 

glimpses of a fulness of messianic salvation in the future. 
The revealing agent was Christ himself ; and in their 
careful study of these hints and foregleams — of " what 
time or what manner of time the spirit of Christ whicli 
was in them did point unto" — they came to see that 
their own ministry was to expand into a later and 
larger ministry, in which other prophets would preach 
that same Christ under the power of the same spirit of 
Christ which inspired them (1 Pet. i. 10-12). That re- 
markable passage is simply the expansion of the words, 
"the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy." 

THE SPIRIT OF JESUS IN SCRIPTURE THE STARTING POINT 
OF A TRUTHFUL CONCEPTION OF INSPIRATION. 

This must be the starting-point of any conception of 
Biblical inspiration that shall at once interpret its 
nature and include all its phenomena : the spirit of 
Jesus, speaking in the Scriptures of both dispensations, 
and imparting to them their searching spiritual analy- 
sis, their power over the conscience, their profound in- 
sight into the truths of the kingdom of God, their 
divine quality of instruction, comfort, and moral stimu- 
lus : Jesus, in these expressions of his personal, divine 
energy, foreshadowing in earlier prophecy his later, 
grander, sweeter revelation — Jesus is the spirit, the 
essential potency, the inspiration of Scripture. If we 
begin with the scholastic descriptions and definitions of 
inspiration, we get nowhere. If we begin with Jesus, 
we do not need these. Take the much discussed words 
in the third chapter of second Timothy, and how much 
do they tell us about inspiration from the scholastic 
point of view? How they rather strike at once into 



34 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

the very marrow of the thing. " Every Scripture that 
is filled with the breath of God is profitable for teach- 
ing, for confutation, for setting to rights, for discipline 
in righteousness, for making a complete man, thor- 
oughly furnished unto every good work." Each of 
these elements of profitableness is perfectly embodied 
and wholly efficient only as Scripture works through 
Christ. In other words, Scripture exerts its highest 
power to teach, reprove, correct, discipline, and perfect, 
only through the personal Christ. 

IS THIS CONCEPTION INDEFINITE? 

It may be said that this conception is indefinite. It 
is so only in contrast with the artificial and superficial 
precision of scholastic definitions. If to be definite is 
to be literal, mechanical, reducible to the limits of such 
phrases as " plenary," " verbal," *' inerrant," " dy- 
namic" and the like, — then the conception is indefinite, 
and the thing itself is indefinite, even as are the most po- 
tent forces of the kingdom of God ; even as God 
himself. The operations of the Spirit of God, how- 
ever cognizable, refuse to confine themselves within 
formulas. Man knoweth not the way of the Spirit. 
Life cannot be formulated. The movement in history 
and in Scripture of such a personality as Christ's can- 
not be expressed by x+y+z. If Biblical inspiration 
can be wholly run into the formulas of the schools, if 
it can be shut up within the lines of an a priori con- 
ception of verbal or scientific accuracy, it is too small to 
work on the same plane with its gigantic sister-forces. 
As well expect a cyclone to pick its way between the 
beds of a kitchen-garden, as that this majestic, personal, 






BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 35 

divine energy, moving with its colossal stride through 
Scripture, should mince its pace over Matthew's mistake 
of Jeremiah for Zechariah, or the discrepancy between 
Stephen and Genesis, or the differences of the four 
Evangelists in recording the inscription over the cross. 
It is with Scripture as with nature. ]STo one can de- 
fine or formulate the divine life-force which animates 
its infinite varieties, or the impression which these com- 
bined varieties produce. Who can say in what consists 
the impression of beauty and power and restfulness 
produced by the forest on a bright morning in sum- 
mer, as one walks along a road with the woods on 
either side, and spreading their boughs above his head 
like the groined arches of a cathedral ? Certain ele- 
ments of beauty are obvious — light, shadow, form, 
color, sound, perfume — but no possible combination of 
these alone will reproduce the impression of the forest. 
There are other elements beside these which appeal to 
a subtler sense, and the elements are not aggregated, 
but blended and fused in a way which defies analysis. 
All the elements are not beautiful according to our ideas 
of beauty : all the combinations are not symmetrical ac- 
cording to our canons of symmetry. Some things are 
wanting which we would have added if we had been 
making a forest : some things are there which we 
would have left out. The forest is not geometrically 
laid out. It is not made up of straight lines and per- 
fect curves and correct angles. There are knots and 
gnarls, branches crossed and distorted and interlaced, 
tangled underbrush, rotting trunks, broken limbs, 
fungi and parasites. These, no less than the light and 
the perfume and the color, enter into the general effect. 



36 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

So, after the component factors of Scripture have been 
reduced to their last analysis, something remains 
which defies analysis, and which is greater and more im- 
pressive than all the factors combined. Its beauty and 
power cannot be reduced to theological categories or 
measured by grammatical, philological, historical, or log- 
ical standards. It is not a photograph of our ideal men 
or of our ideal society. It contains much which, if we 
had been making a Bible, we would have omitted. It 
sets at defiance critical canons which we would never 
have dared to violate. It is full of dark passages, gnarled 
and twisted humanities, broken and tangled histories, 
crooked logic, fragments which cannot be pieced to- 
gether according to any artificial harmony, relics of ex- 
tinct life, traces of the growth and transformations 
of centuries : but though there are thickets through 
which we cannot cut a way, bends which we cannot 
straighten, fragments which we cannot complete, — 
through the midst of all lies a road on which the min- 
gled light and perfume and song — the whole sweet, ex- 
alting, restful power of the Word — come out to him 
who walks it in simple faith, the w t ay, Jesus Christ. 

FALSE LIMITATIONS. 

There are those whose ideal of Scripture is like the 
old French ideal of landscape gardening ; avenues of 
stiff poplars, and trees and hedges trimmed into figures 
of men and beasts. They would clip with their dog- 
matic shears the great cedars of Lebanon which the 
Lord hath planted, and trim the luxuriant foliage into 
theological hobgoblins, and train the clustering vines 
over doctrinal trellises, and then affirm that the clip- 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 3< 

ping and the hogoblins and the stiff trellises represent 
the Bible. Such is the Bible of the schools — a thing 
which is without inspiration, and which mocks and car- 
icatures God and nature and truth ; an enclosure where 
scholastic entomologists and botanists are ever making 
up their collections of dead flies and their herbaria of 
dead leaves ; where literalism has struck at life, and 
petty verbal theories have tainted the fresh, bracing 
breath of the Spirit with the poison of the parching 
Sarsar wind. 

Biblical inspiration, in its large and true sense, rejects 
these limitations. They neutralize any force which the 
appeal of the Bible might otherwise carry for non-Chris- 
tian scholars and thinkers. Whenever this literal and 
verbal mania has had its full swing, it has issued in the 
grossest absurdities and the most fantastic freaks of exe- 
gesis ; in the vagaries of allegory, the monstrosities of 
the Talmud, the fancies of Philo, the extravagances of 
Origen and Clement, the assertion of the divine inspira- 
tion of the Hebrew vowel-points arid accents, and the 
Purist dogma that to speak of barbarisms and solecisms 
in New Testament Greek is blasphemy against the Holy 
Ghost. 

Such puerilities are not confined to the past. The 
Helvetic consensus contains nothing worse than can be 
found in the speech of the Rev. Dr. Birch during 
the trial of Dr. Briggs by the Presbytery of New York. 
He says : " In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ 
not only denies the statements of the Inaugural, that 
there is nothing divine in the letters, words, and clauses 
of the Bible, but he goes further than that. Listen to 
him : ' Think not that I am come to destroy the law or 



38 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. 
For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, 
one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law 
until all be fulfilled.' " After quoting Bishop Ellicott's 
explanation of the words "jot" and "tittle," he pro- 
ceeds : " It was possible, by the neglect or misuse of 
the jot or tittle, to turn divine truth into nonsense or 
blasphemy. Hence, if the law is of a piece with the 
whole Bible, there can be nothing superfluous or insig- 
nificant in that Bible. The jot and tittle are as divine 
as the concepts ! The Inaugural's line of distinction 
between the essentials and the circumstantials is pro- 
nounced by the Bible to be an error. You cannot sep- 
arate, as to divine inspiration, between the religion, 
faith, and morals of the Bible, and its other characteris- 
tics, for example, language, geography, history. If we 
cannot trust the ipsissima verba of the divine writings 
when we want to learn the divine will, 'what is there,' 
asks another, ' that we can trust 1 ' And he goes on to 
say : ' One jot, one pod, a little thing, that is not a letter 
in itself so much as the adjunct and helper of another 
— a yot, a silent thing. The wife of Abraham was 
turned from Sarai to Sarah, and it was the yod that did 
it : it was that little, silent, insignificant adjunct that 
turned her into Princess. God is careful of his yod 
or yot or jot. He does not dot his i for nothing, nor 
cross his t merely for decoration. '" * 

Comment is needless. On one point Dr. Birch is 
absolutely and fatally right. No one has ever more 
conclusively demonstrated that "it is possible, by the 

* The quotation is from the authorized printed report of the 
speech. Most of the italics are mine. 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 39 

misuse of the jot or tittle, to turn divine truth into 
nonsense." 

If, on the other hand, Biblical inspiration be referred 
for its definition and verification to its personal factor, 
to the power communicated by men speaking under the 
impulse of the Holy Ghost, and conveying therefore 
the testimony of Jesus, the standard of reference is 
definite and apprehensible. It is not rendered less 
definite by the recognition in Scripture of the human 
element with all that attaches to it. If the divine in 
Scripture cannot transcend human limitation and im- 
perfection, even where it suffers them to appear and 
speak, it proclaims itself less than divine. If the 
flavor and quickening power of the draught are insep- 
arable from the perfection of the goblet ; if a proved 
error in Scripture contradicts the Scripture claims and 
therefore its inspiration in making those claims, we 
must give up inspiration. The dogma of inerrancy is 
in the teeth of facts on the very face of the Bible, and 
apparent to any competent student of its originals. 

THE QUESTION OF INSPIRATION NOT ESOTEEIC. 

Moreover, it may well be asked what is the nature of 
the appeal which a sound theory of inspiration may 
make to the average mind. This is no light matter, to 
be summarily dismissed with the assertion that it is of 
little consequence that the average mind should have a 
definite conception of the nature of inspiration, so long 
as it accepts Scripture as the word of God and the rule 
of faith and practice. That this is, largely, the attitude 
of the average mind may be granted, as it may be 
granted that such a mind may draw rules of life and 



40 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

spiritual help and comfort from the Bible without 
having a theory of its inspiration or giving any thought 
to that matter. Men lived long before the science of 
biology. But unless the subject is essentially unintel- 
ligible, in which case it has no claim upon any mind, 
it may be confidently affirmed that the hold of Scrip- 
ture upon the average mind will be strengthened by 
some intelligent notion of the meaning and character 
of its inspiration. 

It has been too generally assumed that the question 
of inspiration is esoteric — a question for scholars and 
theologians only ; and that assumption has gained 
ground from the fact that the appeal of the scholastic 
theories is, and must be, mainly to unintelligent belief. 
If inspiration is essentially a question of philology, 
if it is bound up with verbal inerrancy and accurate 
correspondence of detail, such matters cau be settled 
by scholars only. Practically, inspiration means, to the 
great mass of uneducated Christians, verbal dictation, 
mechanical transcription, and supernatural combina- 
tion. It is a thing of the letter and not of the spirit, 
something which is accepted on authority, which carries 
with it no spiritual quickening, but remains a mere 
dogmatic explanation of the process of manufacture, 
quite outside the sphere of spiritual activity. " Yerbal 
inspiration," to quote the words of Henry Wood,* 
has been held as a protective doctrine, but its power to 
promote spiritual and moral energy is wanting. It has 
been relied upon more as a security and authority for 
doctrinal belief, than as a force to quicken life. 
Every sect has used it as an armor to defend its partic- 

* "God's Image in Man." 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 41 

ular tenets, more than as an energizing motive and 
tonic. The prevailing conception of the book has been 
rigid in form but deficient in vitality. It has been 
held sacred as a source of correct theology, but its 
power to infuse God-consciousness is largely unrecog- 
nized. Its spiritual energy is the highest and only test 
of its divine truthfulness, while verbal inerrancy is a 
technicality, and invites attention to the letter that 
killeth rather than to the spirit which giveth life. An- 
cient history, law, and prophecy, and also the teaching 
of Christ and his apostles, must be translated into 
fresh and personal manifestation." 

THE DOCTRINE OF INSPIRATION MAT BE A POWER 
IN THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH. 

No divine truth, especially a truth on which rests 
the authority and power of a book, the teachings of 
which are so knit into the very fabric of human life, 
can be without its direct, practical bearing. Something 
is wrong when such a truth remains only a formula of 
the schools. And therefore the question is pertinent 
why the truth of inspiration, in itself considered, 
should not exert a divine virtue and be a living factor 
of spiritual life and energy in the church ? A correct 
conception of the character and meaning of Biblical in- 
spiration ought to vindicate for itself an inspiring 
power. " The real test of all inspiration," as the au- 
thor just quoted remarks, '* lies in the measure of its 
ability to inspire," and such ability ought to lie in its 
conception as well as in its operation. Such a concep- 
tion is not impossible for the average mind. If the 
personal Christ can be apprehended, so also can the in- 



42 BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 

spiration of Scripture as an expression of his divine 
and human personality. If the fact and the quality of 
inspiration be identified with a personal power and a 
personal testimony in Scripture, if men be taught to 
discern in Scripture a divine witness to faith and love 
and holiness gathering itself from every part into the 
perfect manhood of Jesus — then the doctrine of inspi- 
ration can be taught, not only so as to appeal to the 
average intelligence, but also with power to kindle the 
spiritual consciousness and to evoke its sympathetic re- 
sponse. If the ear of this age could be opened to that 
voice of the God-man tilled with the Holy Ghost and 
speaking in Scripture, if its heart could be laid bare to 
that testimony, the attitude of the apostolic age toward 
Scripture would be reproduced. Earlier conditions, it 
is true, are not better because they are earlier ; but it 
is certain that Scripture appealed to the apostolic 
church as a whole with a freshness, a vividness, a sim- 
plicity, a directness, and a power of conviction which 
are too much wanting in the modern church. The 
reason was that Scripture was searched chiefly in order 
to hear in it the voice and the testimony of Jesus. 

If we are content to drop out of the current of this 
majestic movement of Christ in Scripture, and to busy 
ourselves with the explanation of an eddy or a backset 
here and there, we are out of the current of inspira- 
tion, and in contact with something which has no more 
power of inspiration than a stone. What the world 
needs in the Bible is not the demonstration that Moses 
wrote the whole Pentateuch or that Isaiah is the work 
of a single author : not the mathematical precision of 
Euclid, nor the doctrinal systematizing of Calvin, but 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION AND CHRIST. 43 

the testimony of the living Christ ; the history of God 
in Christ reconciling the World unto himself ; the spir- 
itual impact of men moved by the Spirit of Christ ; 
the mighty influence of that whole mass of history, 
psalmody, proverb, prophecy, biography, gospel and 
epistle, witnessing in human souls to the authority of 
the unseen, and vindicating the claims of eternity against 
those of time and sense. The Bible means to the 
Church this or nothing. A book that will meet this 
demand, and thus show itself profitable for teaching, 
for reproof, for correction, for discipline, for perfecting 
a man of God, can easily carry all the verbal errors and 
discrepancies of number and date which may attach to 
it. They are like flies on the panoply of a giant. The 
Bible is a means, not an end. The design of revela- 
tion does not culminate in a book, but in Christ. The 
book is less than Christ, though Christ is its central 
theme and its inspiration. If we choose to devote our 
energy to the utterly hopeless effort to vindicate inspi- 
ration on the basis of the letter, we shall get out of 
touch with the spiritual potency and divine magnetism 
of the Bible, and shall dwarf the Bible in our own con- 
ception. To no purpose is it that the bush burns with 
fire and sends forth a divine voice, so long as we are 
intent only on the relation and arrangement of the 
twigs, or engrossed in watching whether each tongue 
of flame issues at the same angle with every other. 

[A large part of this pamphlet was published in the 
New World of March, 1893, and is reprinted here with 
the permission of the editors.] 



BIBLICAL INSPIRATION 
AND CHRIST 



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